Background
I decided to build an HTPC as a gift for my Father In Law, to run on his Rear Projection TV (4:3).
Objective was to build as cheaply as possible a machine that would do SD digital TV and video, with scope to upgrade for Full-HD (1080p/i) when he upgrades his TV.
I managed to pick up a second-hand Silverstone LC20 from Ebay for $70. The case is in new condition, but lacked the VFD and IR receiver of the LC20m. I had a spare x2 4000 cpu from another machine, an old dvd drive, some hard drives (an 80gb - (system) and two 160gb's - (one per tuner)). Just needed tuner cards, ram, GPU, PSU and motherboard.
The LC20 can accommodate a full-ATX board and I figure you can never have too much expandability, so grabbed a GA-M720-US3 - AM3 ready, plenty of slots for expansion possibility, an spdif connector at rear (and under $100).
Power supply was a SHAW 680 watt for $23. Im not a big fan of cheap power supplies, as my experience of them has been that they are generally hot and noisy (and susceptable to frying other components when they go belly-up), but I figured the power draw of the machine wouldn't be much over 300w which would mean that @680w rating, it would hopefully run quiet(er) and cool(er) and with a better lifespan than run at peak. Turned out to be not the case. More on this below.
There was an Albatron 256mb 7100GS pci-e GPU available for $29, and as this machine was not intended for HD, I figured that would be ample for SD playback.
I had run MP in XP with 1gb ram in another machine, so opted for 1GB Hynix ddr2 800 ($17). Amazing how cheap RAM is nowadays! I remember back when you just about had to take out a second mortgage for a 64mb stick....
Managed to get two cheap DVB-T tuner cards off ebay for about $20 ea; an Avermedia Super 007 and a Geniatech T800x
So there was the basis of the machine.
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Remote:
I needed to set up a remote as cheaply as possible, and had an old serial IR receiver, a Creative CIMR 100
After doing some reading I was interested to find that these things work without drivers(!). All I had to do was plug it in, interesting; given that serial ports pre-date P'n'P OS's. That part couldnt have been easier.
I discovered an application called uICE which allowed me to map the buttons from a remote [Girder and Eventghost did nto work with it and I have a personal dislike of Winlirc]. I had several remotes to choose from, and after trying some, settled on the DTV2000H remote (installed in my main HTPC, but was spare as I use an iMON with that) mainly because it had all the buttons that I needed, and could be set up relatively insuitively so that WAF and KAF didnt get me in too much trouble during setting up and testing period in our lounge room
Training the remote took a bit of fiddling, mainly, as it turned out, because the baud rate needed to be set at 4800 (default is 9600)
(L...o...n...g story short - read 3 days of trial and error) is that the remote works ok, but there's about a half-second delay after each key press. I have not been able to tweak this out, but this setup is an interim measure as my father-in-law has a Harmony remote which he will map to the IR receiver, so hopefully that may resolve the issue. Not sure if its related to the serial interface or some other aspect, (maybe USB is quicker?), but will address it further once his Harmony is set up, and take it from there.
I liked the idea of mounting the IR sensor in the case itself (rather than having it sit in a box outside). When I opened up the sensor's LARGE plastic enclosure, the entire sensor/circuit board setup was only about 70mm(w) x 30mm(h) x 10mm(d). Conveniently, it even had two screw-holes pre-drilled, so all I had to do was mount it to a small piece of 10mm aluminum L-bracket, which I attached to the HTPC case just behind the plastic IR window with some hot-glue. I cut a 20mm diameter hole in the rubber cover which sits behind plastic frontage on the case (designed to make it opaque), and then sealed the light-admitting gap between the IR circuit board and the rubber cover with a couple of pieces of black insulating tape to make the sensor invisible when looking at the case front-on.
To run the cable through the holes in the front of the case to the serial port, I had to cut off the serial plug (too wide diameter to fit) thread it through the hole, and then re-wire it using some solder and heat shrink. The serial plug then attached to the COM header on the motherboard, and I secured the plug with some velcro and hot glue against the wall of the case, to keep it secure and out-of-the-way. The velcro means its easy to remove should the need arise. This was also a neater solution than the other option available of running the cable to an external serial port at the back of the machine.
Performance
Much to my surprise the 7100GS/(x2)4000 combination played 1080p content flawlessly. I was surprised that a video card at this end of the spectrum, coupled with a not particularly powerful CPU, would be capable, but after testing the setup with a number of trailers and movies, it passed with flying colours on my full-hd LCD TV. Really impressive given the CPU was free and the GPU only cost $29(!)
Issues
Unfortunately, The S-Video output on the Albatron 7100GS was abysmal. No matter what settings I tried, the output was horribly grainy with a repetitive diagonal line running down the screen. An ECS 8400GS was only $15 dearer and pretty much took care of this issue. The Albatron may have been a faulty card, but I wasnt interested in experimenting - just wanted the problem solved. As my father-in-law will be using s-video on his old tv, I wanted it looking as good as possible and so didnt mind wearing a $15 budget blow-out
The $23 power supply was a no-go. It didnt take long for it to hit high temps and for the fan speed to go right up, making it horribly noisy. I had thought that running it at less than half its rated load would avoid this issue, but No. This is the second and last SHAW power supply I have owned. Both have lasted about one week in the machines I have used them in before being removed due to heat and noise. Im off to get a name-brand item that will hopefully run quieter and cooler. Needless to say, SHAW PSU's will never be a feature of any PC's I build in future.
S3 sleep was just not a possibility with this machine. I had a bit of experience troubleshooting sleep issues on other boxes I had built, so covered all the usual bases trying to work out what was precluding it from happening. I never did get to the bottom of it. I do wonder if the motherboard was at fault, and would avoid a GA-M720-US3 in future, just to eliminate this possibility. Fortunately, S4 worked ok, except for a weird screen resolution issue that pops up sometimes on resume - and which I have yet to work out.
The Avermedia Super 007 is not a great tuner card, and I have set it to second priority on the machine. No huge difference in SD, but I noticed a big disparity in quality playing HDTV between it and the Geniatech. Both tuners have sluggish channel change speeds, but not intolerably slow. For just over $20 each they will do fine.
Conclusion:
$70 case
$50 tuner cards
$39 GPU - includes cost of upgrade to 8400GS
$40 PSU - includes cost of yet-to-be upgraded name-brand unit
$99 Motherboard
$17 RAM
$30 misc cables (IDE to SATA converters, serial to COM cable, etc)
$10 serial IR receiver
$0 hard drives
$0 CPU
$0 optical drive
$0 time and elbow-grease
___
$355
For $355, I can give my Father in Law will get a box that will do HD playback and dual recording with 320GB of storage space for his tv shows. My main HTPC cost me close to a Grand to build, so I was interested to see how cheaply this could be done. While its far from a standard-setting HTPC, its functional and will get the job done well. Im pretty happy with the result and cant wait to see the expression on his face when I hand this over at Christmas
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.
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I decided to build an HTPC as a gift for my Father In Law, to run on his Rear Projection TV (4:3).
Objective was to build as cheaply as possible a machine that would do SD digital TV and video, with scope to upgrade for Full-HD (1080p/i) when he upgrades his TV.
I managed to pick up a second-hand Silverstone LC20 from Ebay for $70. The case is in new condition, but lacked the VFD and IR receiver of the LC20m. I had a spare x2 4000 cpu from another machine, an old dvd drive, some hard drives (an 80gb - (system) and two 160gb's - (one per tuner)). Just needed tuner cards, ram, GPU, PSU and motherboard.
The LC20 can accommodate a full-ATX board and I figure you can never have too much expandability, so grabbed a GA-M720-US3 - AM3 ready, plenty of slots for expansion possibility, an spdif connector at rear (and under $100).
Power supply was a SHAW 680 watt for $23. Im not a big fan of cheap power supplies, as my experience of them has been that they are generally hot and noisy (and susceptable to frying other components when they go belly-up), but I figured the power draw of the machine wouldn't be much over 300w which would mean that @680w rating, it would hopefully run quiet(er) and cool(er) and with a better lifespan than run at peak. Turned out to be not the case. More on this below.
There was an Albatron 256mb 7100GS pci-e GPU available for $29, and as this machine was not intended for HD, I figured that would be ample for SD playback.
I had run MP in XP with 1gb ram in another machine, so opted for 1GB Hynix ddr2 800 ($17). Amazing how cheap RAM is nowadays! I remember back when you just about had to take out a second mortgage for a 64mb stick....
Managed to get two cheap DVB-T tuner cards off ebay for about $20 ea; an Avermedia Super 007 and a Geniatech T800x
So there was the basis of the machine.
----------
Remote:
I needed to set up a remote as cheaply as possible, and had an old serial IR receiver, a Creative CIMR 100
After doing some reading I was interested to find that these things work without drivers(!). All I had to do was plug it in, interesting; given that serial ports pre-date P'n'P OS's. That part couldnt have been easier.
I discovered an application called uICE which allowed me to map the buttons from a remote [Girder and Eventghost did nto work with it and I have a personal dislike of Winlirc]. I had several remotes to choose from, and after trying some, settled on the DTV2000H remote (installed in my main HTPC, but was spare as I use an iMON with that) mainly because it had all the buttons that I needed, and could be set up relatively insuitively so that WAF and KAF didnt get me in too much trouble during setting up and testing period in our lounge room
Training the remote took a bit of fiddling, mainly, as it turned out, because the baud rate needed to be set at 4800 (default is 9600)
(L...o...n...g story short - read 3 days of trial and error) is that the remote works ok, but there's about a half-second delay after each key press. I have not been able to tweak this out, but this setup is an interim measure as my father-in-law has a Harmony remote which he will map to the IR receiver, so hopefully that may resolve the issue. Not sure if its related to the serial interface or some other aspect, (maybe USB is quicker?), but will address it further once his Harmony is set up, and take it from there.
I liked the idea of mounting the IR sensor in the case itself (rather than having it sit in a box outside). When I opened up the sensor's LARGE plastic enclosure, the entire sensor/circuit board setup was only about 70mm(w) x 30mm(h) x 10mm(d). Conveniently, it even had two screw-holes pre-drilled, so all I had to do was mount it to a small piece of 10mm aluminum L-bracket, which I attached to the HTPC case just behind the plastic IR window with some hot-glue. I cut a 20mm diameter hole in the rubber cover which sits behind plastic frontage on the case (designed to make it opaque), and then sealed the light-admitting gap between the IR circuit board and the rubber cover with a couple of pieces of black insulating tape to make the sensor invisible when looking at the case front-on.
To run the cable through the holes in the front of the case to the serial port, I had to cut off the serial plug (too wide diameter to fit) thread it through the hole, and then re-wire it using some solder and heat shrink. The serial plug then attached to the COM header on the motherboard, and I secured the plug with some velcro and hot glue against the wall of the case, to keep it secure and out-of-the-way. The velcro means its easy to remove should the need arise. This was also a neater solution than the other option available of running the cable to an external serial port at the back of the machine.
Performance
Much to my surprise the 7100GS/(x2)4000 combination played 1080p content flawlessly. I was surprised that a video card at this end of the spectrum, coupled with a not particularly powerful CPU, would be capable, but after testing the setup with a number of trailers and movies, it passed with flying colours on my full-hd LCD TV. Really impressive given the CPU was free and the GPU only cost $29(!)
Issues
Unfortunately, The S-Video output on the Albatron 7100GS was abysmal. No matter what settings I tried, the output was horribly grainy with a repetitive diagonal line running down the screen. An ECS 8400GS was only $15 dearer and pretty much took care of this issue. The Albatron may have been a faulty card, but I wasnt interested in experimenting - just wanted the problem solved. As my father-in-law will be using s-video on his old tv, I wanted it looking as good as possible and so didnt mind wearing a $15 budget blow-out
The $23 power supply was a no-go. It didnt take long for it to hit high temps and for the fan speed to go right up, making it horribly noisy. I had thought that running it at less than half its rated load would avoid this issue, but No. This is the second and last SHAW power supply I have owned. Both have lasted about one week in the machines I have used them in before being removed due to heat and noise. Im off to get a name-brand item that will hopefully run quieter and cooler. Needless to say, SHAW PSU's will never be a feature of any PC's I build in future.
S3 sleep was just not a possibility with this machine. I had a bit of experience troubleshooting sleep issues on other boxes I had built, so covered all the usual bases trying to work out what was precluding it from happening. I never did get to the bottom of it. I do wonder if the motherboard was at fault, and would avoid a GA-M720-US3 in future, just to eliminate this possibility. Fortunately, S4 worked ok, except for a weird screen resolution issue that pops up sometimes on resume - and which I have yet to work out.
The Avermedia Super 007 is not a great tuner card, and I have set it to second priority on the machine. No huge difference in SD, but I noticed a big disparity in quality playing HDTV between it and the Geniatech. Both tuners have sluggish channel change speeds, but not intolerably slow. For just over $20 each they will do fine.
Conclusion:
$70 case
$50 tuner cards
$39 GPU - includes cost of upgrade to 8400GS
$40 PSU - includes cost of yet-to-be upgraded name-brand unit
$99 Motherboard
$17 RAM
$30 misc cables (IDE to SATA converters, serial to COM cable, etc)
$10 serial IR receiver
$0 hard drives
$0 CPU
$0 optical drive
$0 time and elbow-grease
___
$355
For $355, I can give my Father in Law will get a box that will do HD playback and dual recording with 320GB of storage space for his tv shows. My main HTPC cost me close to a Grand to build, so I was interested to see how cheaply this could be done. While its far from a standard-setting HTPC, its functional and will get the job done well. Im pretty happy with the result and cant wait to see the expression on his face when I hand this over at Christmas
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Denmark